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The CFHODED Ship editing guide
HOD ship editing guide 1.Introduction Hello modders, since I have been recreating the Tutorials section on this wiki I've encountered allot of dead links/pages. All Together allot of full guides are missing pages, recources or images. Therefore I decided to create my own HOD editing guide using the Cold Fusion HOD Editor by 4E534B. First of, as of now this will NOT work for the remastered version, If I ever find a way to get it to work for the remastered the guide will be updated. Second this guide will mainly go into editing and adding ship meshes, turrets, subsystems, weapon, hardpoints and joints. For a guide how to create a subsystem look at the tutorials page. 2.Resources You will need the following in order to complete this guide : - ship folders containing the shipname.hod files - Cold Fusion HOD editor (link) 3.Basic Information 3.1.File information First let us look at the file(s) we are going to edit and in what kind of file structure everything should be. In homeworld 2 all "ships" are located in a directory called shippes, a "ship" typically consists of two or more files. # Shipname.ship file, a .lua file containing the properties of the ship aka its name, armor, weapons ect. # Shipname.hod file, a hod file containing information about the 3d representation of the ship. # Shipname.events file, a .lua file containing the data on what moment animations fire. This file typically also contains the activation of muzzle flashes and death animation of the ship. I will go into how to add/change these when I cover adding more weapons to your ship. All these files MUST have the same name as the folder file. 3.2.Tool information what the hell is on my screen ? (note that this is on the model mode). Before we start working on stuff let us take a look at the tool and what some of the options do. Below You see a screen capture of all the tabs in the left part of the screen. I will explain what is behind all of these buttons in a general sense, we will not use all options and I will go into further detail about some options we will use extensively later. * Textures, contains a list off all textures imported into the HOD file, you can add, remove, export, import and preview the textures. Textures are typically stored over two psd,tga or dss files. One for the diffuse and one for the glow, we will go further into this in basic examples. * Materials, contains a list of materials, you can add, remove and rename materials as well ass assign textures and parameters to them. * Ship Meshes Lists the meshes (extual shapes) imported into the HOD file, you can add, remove, rename, re-normal, re-tangent and change the node attachment of these meshes. * Goblins, also contains a list of meshes. The goblins are the small "extra" parts of the ships * Joints contains a hierarchy of joints on the ship, you can add, add Template and remove joints, as well as edit their location, and orientation. * NavLights, contains a list of "NavLights" named as the node they are attached to, you can add, remove and edit these. * Dockpaths, contains a list of "Dock Paths" these are paths of coordinates around the "ship" that determine the way other ships dock and launch from the ship. You can add, remove and edit these paths. * Markers, contains a list of "markers" these mark important locations on the ship but are not Joints. For example a resource drop off location is marked by a marker. These are only numbered. * Contains a list (mostly just one) of Collision Meshes, this is a special mesh describing the collision box of the ship. You can and, remove, export an import these meshes. As well as edit their join, boundary box and boundary sphere. This can also be auto calculated according to the mesh dimensions. * The engines tabs, as of now I've never extensively used these options so I will add information about this later. 3.3. Textures, Materials and Meshes Before we start on this section, I'm not a 3d artist, have no clue how to make meshes (let alone stick figures) and how to assign materials and textures outside this tool. In a HOD file (and any 3d textured object) any "physical" object has three basic aspects to it : # The 3d representation given by the object mesh and its LOD's (level of details). # The materials the 3d representation is made of. # The texture the material has. To show you how this works the following example: Lets say I want to add a fully textured mesh to the hgn scout. As set before I'm not an artist so we will first need to steal the components needed (see above) from another HOD so this first : # Open the tool # Goto, file-->Open (or press ctrl-o). # Find any other ship (I will use the vaygr missile platform (tbd) in your ships folder. # Open the shipname map and open the HOD file inside. Category:Tutorials